LiveMove bike corridor plan wins state planning award

LiveMove, the UO transportation and livability student group, will receive a statewide award May 30 from the Oregon Chapter of the American Planning Association for its proposed redevelopment of 13th Avenue in Eugene.

PPPM associate professor Marc Schlossberg said the plan is a model for every Oregon community interested in creating a more accessible bicycle network.

“This work is absolutely fabulous and represents the best that planning has to offer our state,” Schlossberg wrote in his nomination letter. “When the project gets built, I expect it to be national news—both for the design implementation and for how the project developed. It will, in my opinion, represent one more way that Oregon planning is innovative and offers inspiration and lessons to the nation.”

The 13th Avenue Corridor Concept Plan argues that current conditions on the one-way street, which has the highest bicycling rates of any street in Eugene, are unsafe for cycling commuters and that a two-way bike lane is necessary.

It provides a block-by-block procedure for creating a direct path between downtown and campus. The two-way bike lane would run nine blocks from Olive to Alder streets, a distance of one mile.

“LiveMove has been gaining attention both across the state and nationally, so this will help illustrate all of the work we do to make Eugene and the UO more livable through better transportation choices,” said LiveMove President Nick Melzter.

The group will receive the Student Achievement in Planning Award. The award ceremony will take place during the annual OAPA conference at 12:30 p.m. May 30 at the Oregon Convention Center in Portland.

Bicycle safety on East 13th Avenue became a focus of concern in the summer of 2008, when 27-year-old David Minor, a UO graduate student, was struck and killed by a motorist on the street.

His parents, Susan and John Minor, donated $150,000 in David’s memory last year to support bicycle safety improvements to the cooridor